Book review - Beyond Indecision: A young novelist goes left and gets serious
David Marcus reviews Benjamin Kunkel’s Utopia or Bust
Western Marxism, like capitalism, operates on thirty-year business cycles. Ever since the First International, in 1864, approximately every third or fourth decade has seen a Marxist renaissance. At the turn of the twentieth century, in the turbulent 1930s, in the malaise-ridden 1970s, and now in the second decade of the 2000s, the specter of Marx has come back to haunt us. As Marx wrote of the reaction that put down the 1848 revolutions, the “ghost walks again.”
This is no coincidence. After all, Marx’s great subject was the underlying instability of capitalism; his theory of history was based on its elaborate pattern of crisis. For Marx, “all that is solid melts into air” was not only a description but also a call to arms: When markets stop making sense, when they stop working, Marxism starts to work, and to make sense—as a revolutionary movement, as a social and cultural lament, and as an economic explanation. But what’s perhaps most striking about the twined history of capitalism and Marxism is how every crisis—er, I mean, “correction”—seems to choose its own Marx. In the 1870s, it was Marx the political conspiracist and revolutionary; at the turn of the twentieth century, it was Marx the social scientist and movement organizer; in the 1930s, it was Marx the cultural critic and moral pessimist; and in the 1970s, it was Marx the social theorist.
Today’s Marx, like his predecessors, is not entirely new; he’s just an exaggeration of one feature of the original model. Instead of focusing on alienation and systems of exploitation, he is primarily concerned with the structural inadequacies and contradictions of capitalism. Instead of delivering clipped polemics and revolutionary manifestos, he writes highly technical surveys of trade balances and speaks the language of Adam Smith rather than of Hegel. This is Marx the political economist, the Marx of the incomplete Grundrisseand his epic, if also never finished, masterwork, Das Kapital.
Benjamin Kunkel’s Utopia or Bust invokes the spirit of this new Marx. His book—a series of essays published in the London Review of Books and n+1 since the 2008 crash—is not, as its subtitle suggests, “a guide to the present crisis” but rather a guide to several of its master theoreticians. Beginning with the updated Marxist crisis theory of David Harvey, Kunkel then works through the historical narratives of Robert Brenner and Ernest Mandel and the cultural criticism of Fredric Jameson before making his way—briefly—out of the Marxist tradition and into the anarchist one of David Graeber.
It’s revealing that Kunkel begins with Harvey and ends with Graeber, for it is between these two Davids—Harvey the Marxist and Graeber the anarchist—that much of today’s left politics lies. On the one end, there is a welcome resurgence of Marxist and what Kunkel calls “Marxish” social criticism. Grouped around magazines like Jacobin, which is publishing Utopia or Bust with Verso, this Left is critical of capitalism’s economic inadequacies: What troubles them most about Western capitalism is how its financial deficiencies and various contradictions disproportionately harm the poor. On the other end, there are the anarchists and radical democrats, whose grievances are more political in nature than economic. They are less interested in capitalism’s maldistribution of goods and services than they are in its maldistribution of power—in the ways that multinational corporations and institutions limit our ability to participate in everyday decision making.
Kunkel identifies himself more with the first camp, but he is not unsympathetic to the political complaints of the second. In part this is because Kunkel has a generous and eclectic political sensibility—a trait common to many leftists who cut their teeth after the Cold War and in the antiglobalization and Occupy movements. But it is also because Harvey’s Marxism and Graeber’s anarchism, when combined, offer us the outlines of a new kind of left politics: a critique of capitalism that is sensitive to the structures of accumulation and power, a theory of inequality that highlights political as well as economic inequities, and a view of history that sees the 2008 crisis as just one of capitalism’s many.
It is, in fact, this sense of history that unites all of Kunkel’s guides. Mandel, Harvey, Brenner, Graeber, and Jameson operate on world-historical scales, moving from Babylon to Brooklyn, from seventeenth-century British farm exchanges to the high finance of London’s Paternoster Square. Central to their projects is the question of what has gone wrong with capitalism since the early 1970s. But they’re also not afraid to look for deep roots, to go way back. Encyclopedic in detail and often monumental in scope, their narratives have little patience for the poststructuralists’ anxiety about representing a greater social whole.
This is capital critique in longue durée, visions of our present crisis stretched to its world-historical maximum, and Kunkel, I think, is right to be drawn to this framework. By capturing capitalism’s “long downturn”—as Brenner puts it in his last book—these longue durée Marxists help reveal the tectonic instability underneath the surface calm, and in employing Marx’s own antiliberal political economy in their readings of the 2008 crash, they provide a theoretical substitute for Keynesian and neoclassical analyses. Most important, by putting capitalism back into its fuller historical context, they help remind us that—contra the famous catchphrase of Margaret Thatcher—there is an alternative... read more:
